Rock On (60 page)

Drenched in the milk-and-silver light of a three-quarter moon, AlA was a spooky place, with its line of hurricane battered condos and motels stretching away like worn teeth in the jawbone of a leviathan; the humps of sand dunes glowed snowy white between them, and on the western side of the road, where once had stood shopping malls and restaurants and bungalows, now there was only a wall of palmetto scrub and palms, oaks and acacias. Darcy ran ahead of me over the tilted-up slabs of asphalt: a slim, sun-darkened girl with blond streaks in her chestnut hair, barefoot, wearing a flimsy dress that the wind plastered against her thighs. She was carrying a waterproof bag to keep our clothes in when we swam out to the pier. Every once in a while she’d stop and let me kiss her. Those kisses were playful at first, but they lasted longer and longer each time, until finally we would be locked together for two or three minutes, with land crabs scuttling around our feet like live pieces of a dirty-white skull. By the time we reached the ramp where we intended to turn down onto the beach, I was in so much pain from wanting her I could hardly walk, and I tried to convince her that it was foolish to wait another month. We loved each other, I said. Why didn’t we hole up in one of the old motels instead of going to the pier? But she pried my hand loose from her hip and skipped off along the ramp, laughing at me.

“Goddammit, Darcy!” I shouted. “It hurts.” I walked after her, exaggerating my limp.

“I heard it can be fatal,” she said, smiling and darting away.

Combers were tossing up phosphorescent sprays, crunching on the shore. In the distance I could make out the spidery silhouettes of the canted Ferris wheel and the Tilt-A-Whirl rising from the darkened Boardwalk, and past them, the centipede-on-stilts shape of the pier; the lights on the dancehall at its seaward end were winking on and off, all colors, like a constellation gone haywire. That pier had been around for a couple of hundred years, surviving storms that had twisted newer piers into a spaghetti of iron girders. Ever since I’d been old enough, I’d climbed all over it, and early on I’d learned that if you could keep from being scraped against the barnacles by the surf, you could scale the pilings out near the end and sneak into the dancehall through a storeroom window with a busted latch and listen to whomever was playing: usually fiddlers and guitar players. Not having the price of admission, this was what Darcy and I had planned to do.

We had reached the beginning of the Boardwalk—stove-in arcades (except for Joyland, which was kept up and ran off the same generator as the dancehall) and fallen-down rides and wrecked miniature golf courses with Spanish bayonets sprouting from their rotted carpeting—when a shadow heaved up from the deeper shadow of the crumbling sea wall and called to us. Mason Bird. A loutish, pudgy kid, whom I didn’t like one bit. His family had wanted to arrange a marriage between him and Darcy, and he had convinced himself that Darcy was marrying me against her will, doing it to please her parents and in reality pining away for him. He came shambling over, a sappy grin splitting his round face, and tried to make eye contact with her. “If you’re goin’ to the show tonight,” he said, “you better have a fortune in your pocket.”

“We’re just walkin’,” I said stiffly.

“Gonnabe quite a show,” said Mason, his eyes glued to Darcy’s chest. “This ol’ gypsy girl was tellin’ me ’bout it.”

“Oh?” said Darcy, and I frowned at her: Mason didn’t need any encouragement.

“Yeah,” said Mason. “Seems they was pokin’ ’round in New York City two, three years ago, and they found themselves an android. That’s kinda like a man. Got blood and organs and all, but no personality. No mental stuff.”

“Bullshit!” I said.

Mason acted as if he hadn’t heard. “But them ol’ scientists had a way of stickin’ real people’s memories inside its head, and they give it the memories of this famous musician. Fella named Roy John Harlow. Plays up a storm, I hear.”

I took Darcy’s arm. “So long, Mason,” I said. We started walking, but he fell into step beside us.

“Reckon I’ll wander along and see if there ain’t some stray honey who wants to go,” he said. “Me and Pa sold us a load of dried shrimp, and I got money to burn.”

It occurred to me that Mason must have guessed we’d be coming down the beach and—knowing I never had any money—had staked himself out by the sea wall in hopes of persuading Darcy to ditch me. I was furious, and Darcy must have sensed it, because she squeezed my arm and gave me a look that seemed to be asking me to spare Mason’s feelings. I clammed up, but it put me in a sulk; I could see how the night would go, with me and Darcy trying to slip away and Mason dogging our every move.

About a hundred feet further along, we ran into a group of people on the beach in front of the Joyland Arcade, and one of them—old man Rickerd, locks of his gray hair whipping like flames in the breeze—was shouting that we should stop the gypsies from bringing this evil into our midst. “Might as well feed your kids poison!” he said. “Know what they used to call rock ’n’ roll? The Devil’s music!” From where I was standing, the neon word JOYLAND was spelled out in an arc above his head, adding an incongruous caption to his evangelic witnessing, and inside the arcade, dark figures were hunched over the games: it looked strange, that one brightly lit place among all the shadowy ruin. “Roy John Harlow!” sneered Rickerd. “It’s got a man’s name, but you can’t fool a fool for Christ! That’s the Devil in there, sure as I’m born!”

Some people argued against Rickerd, but the majority were in agreement. That struck me as funny, because, while most of the adults in Daytona would say that the world was better off than it had been before the Winnowing, you could tell they didn’t really believe it; the stories their grandparents had told had made them long for things they’d never seen, and their attitude was, in part, sour grapes. As for us kids, we had too much distance from the Winnowing, and we were merely curious about the past, not haunted by it. The argument heated up, and though everybody there knew that nothing was going to come of it, judging by all the yelling and fist-shaking, you’d have sworn that a lynch mob was forming. Mason chipped in his two-cents’-worth, no doubt trying to impress Darcy with his intellect; since he was the only kid involved in the argument, he soon became its central focus and was drawn into the middle of the group. Seizing the opportunity, Darcy and I sprinted off toward the pier, holding hands and laughing at our slick escape.

It was high tide, which was the only time you could manage the swim; when the tide was going out, there was a fierce undertow and you’d have to be an idiot to risk it. We let a wave carry us close to the pilings, grabbed a cross-piece, swung up, and before long we were crawling under the railing at the rear of the dancehall: a big two-story affair with peeling yellow paint. The music had already begun—shards of searing melody mixed in with the rush of wind and surf—and it was the music as much as my wetness that caused me to shiver. I pulled on my pants and caught a glimpse of Darcy shrugging into her dress. In the moonlight she looked like a woman of copper, and the sight of her small pointy breasts made me shiver even more. We cracked the storeroom window. Inside, the planking of the walls and floor was black and bubbled with creosote, shined to ebony by the glare of a dangling light bulb. Cobwebs spanned between a number of old packing crates, and next to the door that led to the stage was a coffinlike box of gray metal. You could hear the music fine. We clambered through the window and settled behind one of the crates, where nobody would see us. I put my arm around Darcy, and she snuggled close, enveloping me in her clean, briny scent. After that we just listened.

I wish I could say the things that music said to me, I wish I could write down the notes into words. Sometimes it sounded like metal animals having a fight (I imagined a cloud of dust with lightning jabbing out the sides), and other times it was eerie and full of spaces, with a gravelly voice floating between the guitar passages. But no matter what the mode, it maintained a grumbling bottom, and most of all it was loud. The loudness got inside you, jumped along your nerves and made you arch your back and throw back your head. Maybe Rickerd was right and it was the Devil’s music, because while there were several instruments playing, it had the feel of a single fiery voice howling from a pit, the voice of a spirit, angry and despairing. Yet for all its anger and despair and loudness, it was still beautiful. Not a mental, thoughtful beauty, a beauty that’s easy to recognize, but a beauty of muscle and blood and violent emotion. And I wondered if that might not be what the Devil really was: that kind of beauty misunderstood.

The crowd responded to each song with sparse applause. I pictured them ringing the stage, my friends and their parents dressed in threadbare hand-me-downs, applauding less for the music than for the diversion—a bit of glittering life caught in the dull nets of our lives—and confused by this monstrous noise and the odd creature who had produced it. Then Roy John Harlow would introduce the next song, saying once, “Here’s a little tune I wrote ’bout a hunnerd ’n forty years ago,” and giving a sarcastic laugh. Embodied in the laugh was the same powerful despair that moved in the music, and the longer he played, the more dominant that despair became. Finally, following an extended silence during which the crowd muttered and rustled, Roy John Harlow said, “I wanna do one more for you. Somethin’ I finished a few days ago. It’s probably gonna be the last tune I write, ’cause it says all I gotta say ’bout the way things are nowadays.” The song had no music but was accompanied by echoing doubled handclaps that he inserted at the ends of lines and—now and again—in the middles. Though as with the other songs, many of the words were unfamiliar, there was no mistaking its meaning: he was evoking our common sadness, making us feel what we had tried not to for so long.

“Once I had a lady, she moved like a river and looked like an

angel in red,

And I knew a guy name of Gordon, he could always sell you

somethin’ good for your head.

There used to be a joint down on the corner where you could

grab a beer or two . . .

And sometimes I’d catch a jet plane to Paris and go dancin’

on the Cote d’Azure . . .

Dancin’ on the Cote d’Azure

“Once there were Cadillacs . . . Cadillacs!

Once there were space shots and astronauts,

Bluejeans and silver screens,

Diamond rings and dyin’ kings with computer hearts.

Once there was everything you wanted and too much to

choose,

And once I felt like fallin’ in love . . .

Once I felt like fallin’ in love.”

Most of the song was like that: lists of names and things and places that—as I’ve said—were foreign to me. Looking at them now, I can’t understand why they affected me so much; but at the time they seemed emblematic of something rare and alluring, and when Roy John Harlow sang the chorus, I’d feel an awful tightness in my chest and would have to lower my head and close my eyes.

“Hey, hey, baby! It feels so wrong!

Ain’t no sense in keepin’ on, keepin’ on . . .

My head starts achin’ when I think about it’s all gone,

And how my heart breaks when I sing this song . . .

How my heart breaks when I sing this song.”

There was hardly any applause afterward, and it wasn’t more than a second or two later that the storeroom door creaked open and footsteps scraped on the planking. Darcy and I kept dead still. We hadn’t expected the performance to conclude so abruptly, and we had believed we’d have time to climb out the window.

“Don’t put me back in there, man,” said a, gravelly voice. “Lemme sit up tonight.”

“I don’t know,” said a deeper voice. “I got . . . ”

“C’mon, man! You gotta gimme some life once in a while. Just cuff me and lemme sit.”

“All right,” said the deep voice. “But I’m postin’ a guard out front. Don’t you think ’bout goin’ nowhere.”

“Where am I gonna go in this goddamn world?” said Roy John Harlow.

I heard a metallic snick.

“You wanna smoke?” asked the deep voice, and Roy John Harlow said, “Yeah.” Then the door banged shut.

Until that moment I’d thought of him as a man, imagining him to be similar to the run of Daytona men—burly, bearded, tanned—only dressed fancier. But now I wondered what fearsome thing might be waiting on the other side of the crate. From beyond the door came a thump, voices fading and then sheared away by a second thump, and I realized that the gypsies had closed the dancehall. Soon they’d be shutting down the generator. I didn’t want to be trapped in the dark with an unknown quantity, and so—screwing up my courage—I had a peek at Roy John’ Harlow.

He was sitting on the gray metal box, his wrist cuffed to its handle, smoking a crookedy cigar and staring at the wall. In only one particular had my image of him been correct: he was wearing red leather trousers and a white silk shirt. His black hair had been molded into a pompadour that had more-or-less the shape of a rooster’s comb, with a curl hanging down over his forehead. He was thin, and his long-jawed, hollowed face had an evil handsomeness; it was a face better suited to a sneer than a smile. Then he turned to me, stared straight at me, and I saw that instead of normal irises and pupils, the whites of his eyes were figured by two black hearts. I had the idea that—like the cherries and lemons on the windows of the slot machines in the Joyland Arcade—those hearts could be whirled away and other symbols would roll up in their place. Two spades, maybe, or two roses. He didn’t seem surprised by my being there, just puffed his cigar and blew smoke. The fact that he didn’t react eased my fears, and I understood how perfectly his appearance fitted his music. To my mind rock ’n’ roll and Roy John Harlow were one and the same. He was the personification of that spirit-voice singing out from the flames of hell, and I guess that’s the way he perceived himself: a lost soul trapped in a world that was the ashes of a fuller, brighter place.